Quotulatiousness

July 14, 2017

Brace yourself for the next round of Obamacare [repeal | reform | tweaking | posturing]

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Megan McArdle doesn’t view this latest attempt to “fix” Obamacare with any great optimism:

Mitch McConnell is once again announcing that the Senate is going to come out with a new health-care bill and try to hold a vote next week. That exhaustion you feel is the same despair that seeps over you when a pair of ill-matched friends announce for the 17th time that they’re getting back together.

As with those friends (we all have them, don’t we?) there seems to be no set of mutual goals upon which a durable partnership can be built. Many Republican legislators want Obamacare to die. Others would probably attend the funeral with ill-concealed delight, but they don’t want a reputation for having killed it. Still others would like to be able to tell voters that they “did something” about Obamacare, even though in reality they are loath to actually, you know, do something — because their states would lose money, or voters would lose insurance.

[Wearily] So what can be done here? Realistically.

As an exercise on paper, the answer is easy:

  1. Stop trying to make this a tax-cut bill, and focus on reforms that can pave the way to fiscal stability, and dismantling many of the perverse incentives that have so distorted our health-care system.
  2. Leave Obamacare’s taxes intact. (Yes, even the dumb ones, of which there are many.)
  3. Turn Medicaid into a fixed grant rather than an open-ended entitlement, either by making it a block grant, or switching to a flat per-beneficiary payout — but don’t try to make block grants a confusing cover for very deep cuts to the program.
  4. Provide generous funding to stabilize the individual health-insurance exchanges, but demand in return very wide latitude for states to decide how they stabilize their insurance markets — including jettisoning any of the Obamacare regulations they think are getting in the way.
  5. Meanwhile, move the system more aggressively toward health-savings accounts plus catastrophic insurance — and get Democrats on board by offering to have the government fund some portion of those health savings accounts for low-income citizens.

Is that my ideal health-care system? No. But it gives Republicans some of what they want (a more consumer-driven, pro-market program in the individual market, and a big start toward reforming the bloated and byzantine mess that is the Medicaid program). It gives Democrats some of what they want (money for people who don’t have very much of it, plus they don’t get splattered by the fallout of Obamacare exchanges melting down). In theory, it could pass.

And in theory, I could play third base for the Yankees, if Joe Girardi were willing to hire me. The truth is that after years of complaining about obstructionism, Democrats have developed a sudden taste for the stuff; there’s a substantial faction of both politicians and voters who want the Democrats to stand by and do nothing, nothing, that Republicans might like. And even among those who think they want bipartisan compromise — well, I spend a lot of time listening to those folks, and when you get down to it, frequently their idea of a “compromise” is that they get a huge government program that costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and Republicans get trivial increases in the size of health-savings accounts, and maybe to twiddle with a few of the outer decimal points on growth rates. In other words, what they think is a vision of compromise is too often actually a vision of America ca. 1992, when Republicans were a minority party who had to come begging for crumbs.

Canadian Experimental Lightweight No4 Enfield

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 20 Mar 2017

Sold for $25,300 – http://jamesdjulia.com/item/1659-396/

In 1943 the need for a lighter and handier version of the Lee Enfield rifle became clear throughout the British Commonwealth, and experimentation began in Canada, Britain, and Australia. The work in Britain would culminate in the No5 Mk1 rifle, but the Canadian arsenal at Long Branch would try some different ideas first. Several different experimental prototypes were made with varying features, but they all shared the idea of substantially lightening the rifle without shortening it very much. This was done by removing metal anywhere possible, most obviously including the elimination of the stock socket and the use of a single piece stock in place of the traditional two piece Enfield stock.

These modifications, also including an aluminum alloy trigger guard, were able to cut 25% of the weight from the rifle, and do so without a significant loss in accuracy. However, I suspect the resulting rifle would have proven far too fragile for combat use had it been adopted. The stock is surprisingly light and thin at the wrist, and it feels like it would not take much force to crack it. In addition, lightening cuts down the length of the hand guard made it quite susceptible to warping with heat and humidity changes.

Ultimately the Long Branch Lee Enfield carbine experiments would be abandoned as the No5 “Jungle Carbine” was adopted instead.

QotD: Did the Holocaust Undermine the German War Effort?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the great paradoxes of the Second World War is that while German troops on the Eastern Front were starving and freezing to death for lack of supplies, the rail transport of Jews to the death camps proceeded with uninterrupted Teutonic efficiency. The explanation is found in a profound insight by the historian Gerhard Weinberg (born 1928); that for the Nazis the extermination of Europe’s Jews was the purpose of the war, not a distraction or a side show. A complication was that this “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was a state secret, even though it might have been the worst-kept secret in history.

Yaron Pasher is a young Israeli historian who studied under Weinberg. In this book he sets out to explore how the implementation of the Holocaust fatally undermined the German war effort between 1941 and the final collapse in May 1945. Unfortunately Pasher is simply out of his depth trying to write military history from the perspective of logistics (admittedly, one of the hardest things that any historian can attempt!).

Much of the text is a mish-mash of rehashed secondary sources about the course of operations on the Eastern and Western fronts. The reader bogs down, like a Panzer division in the Spring thaw, in a welter of inconsistently transliterated Slavic place names. The narrative is interspersed with glimpses of the progress of the Final Solution repeatedly hammering home the same assertion: if all those trains that carried Jews to the death camps had been used to carry supplies and reinforcements to the Front, the Wehrmacht might have performed better against the Russians.

Yaron Pasher, “Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s “Final Solution” Undermined the German War Effort”, Strategy Page, 2015-09-02.

July 13, 2017

“Each month in the United States—a place with about 160 million civilian jobs—1.7 million of them vanish”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Deirdre McCloskey addresses the fear that technological change is gobbling up all the jobs:

Consider the historical record: If the nightmare of technological unemployment were true, it would already have happened, repeatedly and massively. In 1800, four out of five Americans worked on farms. Now one in 50 do, but the advent of mechanical harvesting and hybrid corn did not disemploy the other 78 percent.

In 1910, one out of 20 of the American workforce was on the railways. In the late 1940s, 350,000 manual telephone operators worked for AT&T alone. In the 1950s, elevator operators by the hundreds of thousands lost their jobs to passengers pushing buttons. Typists have vanished from offices. But if blacksmiths unemployed by cars or TV repairmen unemployed by printed circuits never got another job, unemployment would not be 5 percent, or 10 percent in a bad year. It would be 50 percent and climbing.

Each month in the United States — a place with about 160 million civilian jobs — 1.7 million of them vanish. Every 30 days, in a perfectly normal manifestation of creative destruction, over 1 percent of the jobs go the way of the parlor maids of 1910. Not because people quit. The positions are no longer available. The companies go out of business, or get merged or downsized, or just decide the extra salesperson on the floor of the big-box store isn’t worth the costs of employment.

What you hear on the evening news is the monthly net increase or decrease in jobs, with some 200,000 added in a good month. But the gross figure of 1 percent of jobs lost per month is the relevant one for worries about technological unemployment. It’s well over 10 percent per year at simple interest. In just a few years at such rates — if disemployment were truly permanent — a third of the labor force would be standing on street corners, and the fraction still would be rising. In 2000, well over 100,000 people were employed by video stores, yet our street corners are not filled with former video store clerks asking for loose change.

We could “save people’s jobs” by stopping all innovation. You would do next year exactly what you did this year. Capital as well as labor would perpetually be employed the same way. But then we would perpetually have the same income. That’s nice if you’re doing well now. It’s not so nice if you’re poor or young.

Job protections for the old have in fact already created a dangerous class of unemployed youths in the world — 50 percent among Greeks and black South Africans, for instance.

Words & Numbers: Do Airlines Charge Too Much?

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 12 Jul 2017

This week on Words & Numbers, James R. Harrigan and Antony Davies tackle the issue of airline pricing. Why do they charge what they do? What do those prices mean? Is it too much and are passengers being ripped off?

“Stop lamenting the days of ‘objective’ news reporting. There was never any such thing”

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on the ridiculous nostalgia for the “objectivity” of the three networks era (or earlier):

It never fails. Someone gets in a discussion (yes, on Facebook. Where else? It’s where the fossilized stupidity of ages past has come to die and decay, forming a substratum not unlike oil, but far less useful. Well, unless you’re a blogger in need of post ideas.) about some of the latest misdeeds of the press, like say CNN’s bizarre pivot from all Russia all the Time to threatening posters for funny memes (Yes, of course I can barely resist the GIF posts when I see that. Unfortunately they take more time than writing.) and someone comes on and laments the days when the media was “objective.”

This is when I’d dent my desk with my head, except I have one of those standing desks that’s made of plastic which pops right back up. Good thing too.

I too would love the mythical times when kings were just, ordained by G-d and pulled the sword from the stone. They are as real as the days of “honest” media.

Look, take it from someone who went through journalistic training. EVERY good journalist (a minority as in all other professions) TRIES to be unbiased. This is relatively (but only relatively) easy when writing about the incident on first and main where a dog bit a man. It is far less convenient/easy when writing about a politician who embezzled something. And since politics touches everything these days, the result of the media’s obsession with making the personal political, it’s becoming impossible to report ANYTHING objectively, including the dog/man incident. I mean, do you want to get mobbed by PETA? What about people who love leash laws? What about the lobby to eliminate pit bulls?

Having training in journalism, and friends in the profession, I can tell you those “great” long ago times when all newspapers spoke with a unified voice, the narrative made sense and “everyone agreed” on what was sane and sensible, were anything but bipartisan, or impartial.

What they were was UNIFIED and totalitarian, in the sense that your entire media experience came from a very small number of people, who mutually vetted each other, and who had all been educated in the same colleges and believed the same things.

The era of newspaper “objectivity” also happened to be the era of newspaper monopolies, as Tim Worstall pointed out the other day. The supposed objectivity was a function of their need not to create opinion space for competitors to arise that would threaten their monopoly position for commercial advertising and classified ads (especially the classified ads). True objectivity is a difficult problem anyway:

I’m simply going to say, like Heinlein did, at about my age, that I’ve never seen any event I was witness to reported with ANY degree of accuracy. In fact, often they are completely and insanely wrong. But the report fits the left wing “narrative” in which they are good and moral so there’s that.

Prior to the industrial era, and the unification of newspapers and the distribution of some of those throughout the nation, shaping the opinion of all the smaller wanna bes, media was gloriously, loudly, obviously biased.

Stands to reason. Being humans we can’t hope for “no bias.” No, listen to me, it’s impossible. My husband and I are as close as two human beings can be, and have been married for over 30 years. Yet if we both witness something and describe it, our different backgrounds and natures come to the fore.

Setting-up Your First Woodworking Shop Pt. 1

Filed under: Technology, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 7 Jun 2014

http://HomegrownFurniture.com Create your own woodworking shop from scratch. In part one of this video series, woodworker Jim Thompson helps you build your very first woodworking workshop. Jim includes buying tips, craigslist tactics and tool recommendations for a new woodworker on a budget.

QotD: What are “network effects”?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Few buzzwords are hotter in tech circles than “network effects.” This was so 15 years ago, when I was an MBA candidate grinding through job interviews; it is so today. Probably, when the heat death of the universe is imminent, and our nine-tailed descendants are trying to figure out what to do, some bright Johnny will suggest we can keep things going if we can just add another 2 billion stars to our user base.

Don’t get me wrong: Network effects are important, and I frequently talk about them in relation to everything from media companies to neighborhoods to choices about motherhood. But when I hear the term, the hairs rise on the back of my neck, because it’s often used imprecisely. People say “network effects” when they are really talking about switching costs, or regulatory coordination, or spillover effects, or any number of other things that are at best tangentially related to what the network effect model was built to describe.

Worse, far too many people seem to use the term the way college sophomores deploy the names of philosophers they have just read, in the mistaken belief that a piece of jargon can magically banish disagreement. Your firm doesn’t seem to have a viable revenue model? You’re just saying that because you don’t understand network effects! Someone seems insufficiently worried about the market power of some technology behemoth? It must be because that benighted fool has never heard about network effects!

Network effects are a useful concept, but not when deployed in this slipshod way. Worse, such careless routine deployment actually threatens the concept’s usefulness in conversations where it does offer real insight.

So just what is a network effect? The term describes a product that gets more valuable as more people adopt it, a system that becomes stronger as more nodes are added to the network. The classic example of network effects is a fax machine. The first proud owner of a fax machine has a very expensive paperweight. The second owner can transmit documents to the guy with the pricey paperweight. The thousandth owner has a useful, but limited, piece of equipment. The millionth owner has a pretty handy little gadget.

Megan McArdle, “Facebook Is Big, But Big Networks Can Fall”, Bloomberg View, 2015-10-08.

July 12, 2017

World of Warships – Dunkirk

Filed under: Britain, Gaming, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Published on 11 Jul 2017

It’s all well and good for Churchill to promise to “Fight them on the beaches…”, but first he had to get them off the beaches of France to ensure he had anyone to fight them on the beaches of England with…

Someone at the NRA finally speaks out on the shooting death of Philando Castile

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Radley Balko on the problems the NRA creates for itself by its reflexive support of the police, which weakens its efforts on upholding gun rights for ordinary Americans:

At long last, someone from the National Rifle Association has spoken up about Philando Castile. Sort of. During a CNN segment, NRA spokeswoman and pundit Dana Loesch said this:

    I think it’s absolutely awful. It’s a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided. I don’t agree with every single decision that comes out from courtrooms of America. There are a lot of variables in this particular case, and there were a lot of things that I wish would have been done differently. Do I believe that Philando Castile deserved to lose his life over his [traffic] stop? I absolutely do not. I also think that this is why we have things like NRA Carry Guard, not only to reach out to the citizens to go over what to do during stops like this, but also to work with law enforcement so that they understand what citizens are experiencing when they go through stops like this.

As Jacob Sullum points out at Reason, this is pretty weak stuff. A law-abiding gun owner was shot and killed by a cop after doing everything he was supposed to do. It then took more than a year for anyone from the nation’s largest gun rights organization to comment, and when she did, she offered a vague, heavily qualified, quasi-criticism of the cop while implying not only that Castile contributed to his death but also that he might be alive if only he were carrying an NRA Carry Guard card.

This is about par for the course for the NRA. This is the group that claims to be the only thing preventing the government from obliterating the Second Amendment, yet they’re noticeably quiet about the people doing the most violence to the Second Amendment — the armed, badge-wearing government employees we call law enforcement officers. For all the NRA’s dire warnings about government gun confiscation, the real, tangible threat to gun-owning Americans today comes not from gun-grabbing bureaucrats but from door-bashing law enforcement officers who think they’re at war — who are too often trained to view the people they serve not as citizens with rights but as potential threats. Here, the NRA just doesn’t want to get involved.

[…]

In short, the NRA seems to think we’re at risk of creeping tyranny and abuse of power from all sectors of government except from the men and women armed, badged and entrusted with the power to kill. That’s a problem, because if armed agents who enforce the laws on the ground aren’t required to respect our rights, our rights don’t really exist.

The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on the Castle Doctrine for the next 25 years, but if the police continue to kick down doors with impunity, law-abiding gun owners will be at risk, and the Second Amendment will be more of an empty gesture than a constitutional protection. The Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way on conceal carry for the next 25 years, but if the organization keeps pushing the line that cops are at war, that the populace is dangerous, and that every citizen is a possible threat, the right to carry a gun in public will always be constrained by cops conditioned to see every weapon as a threat to their existence.

Finally, the Supreme Court could rule the NRA’s way and abolish all the state laws like those that ensnared Shaneen Allen, but as long as the NRA and its allies push rhetoric that makes white people (and white cops) see all crime with a black face, the right to bear arms for people who look like her — or who look like Philando Castile — exist only in theory.

The Bronze Age Collapse – II: The Wheel and the Rod – Extra History

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on Jul 1, 2017

Bronze Age societies built intricate networks of trade, advanced military infrastructure, and hugely organized central governments. But when crucial parts of those systems began to disappear, the societies built on them began to crumble.

The real newspaper problem is not Facebook and Google … it’s their monopolistic heritage

Filed under: Business, History, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall argues against allowing US newspapers to have an anti-trust exemption to fight Facebook and Google:

The first thing to note is the influence of geography and transport. By definition a newspaper needs to arrive daily — in physical format least — meaning that there’s a useful radius around a printing plant which can be served. What then happened is exactly what is happening with Google and Facebook, network effects come into play. Each urban area effectively became the monopoly of just the one newspaper. Sure, there were more than that in New York City for example, SF supported two majors later than many other places. But even in such large and rich places we did really only ever end up with one “serious” newspaper.

The network effects stem from the revenue sources. Roughly speaking, you understand, one third came from subscription revenues, one third from display advertising and one third from classifieds. Classifieds are a classic case of said network effects. Everyone advertises where they know everyone reads. Everyone reads the ads where they know everyone advertises those used baby bassinets. Whoever can get ahead in the collection of either then almost always wins the race. Classifieds are also hugely, vastly, profitable.

The way that American newspapers are sold, on subscriptions with a local paper boy, also contains elements of such network effects.

The effect of this economic structure was that each major urban area really had the one monopolist newspaper. This is where that famed “objectivity” comes from too. If there’s going to be the one newspaper then it’s going to try to make sure there’s no room for another by steadily occupying the middle ground on anything and everything. This is just the Hotelling problem all over again. Swing too viciously left or right (on any issue, political, social, whatever) and there might be room for someone to sneak in from the borderlands. Thus the very milquetoast indeed political views at most of these newspapers.

[…]

And that, I insist, is what is really happening to US newspapers. Most certainly, their problems stem from the internet. for the internet broke that monopoly imposed by economic geography and all else stems from that. They got fat and happy within those monopolistic areas and their pain is coming from the adjustments necessary to deal with that. The likely outcome I would expect to be many fewer first line newspapers staffed by many fewer people in much the way that the UK market has worked for near a century now. I would also expect to see them using political stance as a differentiator just as in Britain.

Triumph Staaaaag – Clarkson’s Car Years – BBC

Filed under: Britain, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 14 Apr 2008

Jeremy Clarkson has his say about the wonders and worries of the Triumph Stag. Apparently, it sounds better if you stay on the vowel!

QotD: Modern myth-making

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… evidence of myth making is everywhere, and not just in the far past, when it’s easier to swallow just-so stories.

There seems to be this strange idea that we must tell stories of the world as we wish it to be and then it will automagically become so. And because no part of the world, and no time in History can compare to Western society in the current times (and very few can compare to the United States of America) the way to bring their stories into existence is to tell us how bad we are in comparison to everyone else.

The fact that this is a blatant lie doesn’t matter. They still do it.

They are convinced, if they can shame us with these imaginary superior cultures that we will somehow adopt the ways they want us to.

One egregious demonstration of this is the claim that other times and places were more tolerant of different sexual personas. This one makes me want to SCREAM because… well… define “more tolerant.”

Traditional societies often had niches for sexually different people, including but not limited to those who lived as the opposite sex. BUT when the ignorant parrots of the western world go on about this stuff, they usually know just enough about the other culture to project all sorts of happy thoughts upon it. The thing is that assuming the persona and lifestyle of the opposite sex was often not a choice, and not because the person “felt” one way or another. Certain social circumstances dictated a certain change. Like, in Romania (I think) a woman whose brothers have been killed was almost required to assume a male persona in order to support the family. Whether she wanted to or not. And I have a vague idea that in certain parts of India, a woman who cannot find a husband is allowed to “marry” another woman. Note there is no mention made of sexual desire for her own gender. It’s more a matter of fitting neatly into society.

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Inventing the Past — The Great Divorce”, According to Hoyt, 2015-09-23.

July 11, 2017

Maria Bochkareva and the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Published on 10 Jul 2017

Maria Bochkareva was one of several Russian women who volunteered to fight in the name of the Tsar in 1914. She fought with distinction on the Eastern Front until the Russian Revolution. To set an example against the falling morale in the post-revolutionary Russian Army, she requested to train and lead the first Russian Women’s Death Battalion – ready to die for their country. During the Kerensky Offensive they went over the top and suffered heavy casualties. Ultimately, Bochkareva was executed by the Bolsheviks during the turmoil of the Russian Civil War.

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